We just kept the box.

God forgive us, we just kept the box.

I found, to my surprise, that I could not fully hate them for it, though I had driven to Indianapolis prepared to.

They had done a terrible thing, a genuinely terrible thing, years of a child’s love withheld out of fear and then out of fear of admitting the fear.

But I had spent three years unable to empty two bedrooms, unable to move a purple hoodie or a stack of library books, frozen by a grief that made no rational sense to anyone outside it.

I knew, better than I wanted to, how a person can get stuck in an impossible position and then stay stuck simply because every day of staying makes the leaving harder.